Guardian HDD destruction
Thread Starter
Joined: Jun 2001
Posts: 4,369
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From: UK.
Guardian HDD destruction
Revealed: the day Guardian destroyed Snowden hard drives under watchful eye of GCHQ - video | World news | theguardian.com
Why did the poor old motherboard get a going over?
All the angle grinder stuff really is a bit of grandstanding.
One HDD seemed to have the top side of the top disc trashed; what about the rest of it?
Seems to me that they made a big show of the wrong bits.
In any case, if the GCHQ types had just carried out a format/overwrite/format that would have pretty much achieved THEIR aim.
Why did the poor old motherboard get a going over?
All the angle grinder stuff really is a bit of grandstanding.
One HDD seemed to have the top side of the top disc trashed; what about the rest of it?
Seems to me that they made a big show of the wrong bits.
In any case, if the GCHQ types had just carried out a format/overwrite/format that would have pretty much achieved THEIR aim.
Joined: Aug 2002
Posts: 3,663
Likes: 0
From: Earth
Basil,
Simple. Because the usual simple boring government way of just sticking drives through industrial shredders would not sell newspapers.
So the Grauniad wanted to make a big show and dance, because quite honestly thats all the destruction of a couple of physical drives would be ... just one big show. GCHQ would be more interested in making sure things weren't hiding elsewhere on the Grauniad network and I suspect separate discussions were held with the Grauniad IT department over that.
Simple. Because the usual simple boring government way of just sticking drives through industrial shredders would not sell newspapers.
So the Grauniad wanted to make a big show and dance, because quite honestly thats all the destruction of a couple of physical drives would be ... just one big show. GCHQ would be more interested in making sure things weren't hiding elsewhere on the Grauniad network and I suspect separate discussions were held with the Grauniad IT department over that.
Joined: Jan 2008
Posts: 300
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From: London, England
Actually is it more likely as a result of having to comply with government approved techniques for sanitising machines. The problem with motherboards these days is they usually have flash memory soldered onto them. These cannot be wiped so the only approved method involves destruction. Even RAM modules don't escape being 'processed'. At the very least they have to be subjected to full MEMTEST passes, and then powered down for a minimum of 24 hours (or something like that). Hard disks have to be wiped using approved software like Blancco. The problem is that the RAM and Harddisk processing I have just mentioned only brings the classification down from secret to restricted, and even restricted material has to be tightly controlled as assets. The Guardian might not have had approved processes for the handling of government UK restricted material, let alone UK secret, and therefore the only option was destruction as you have seen.
Joined: Jan 2007
Posts: 729
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From: San Jose
It was all security theatre. If the government bods didn't understand that there were other copies of the data beyond their reach then they shouldn't be in the job. Personally, I think the Guardian was having a laugh at their expense. For all we know, they already had an SD card with a copy of the data safely taped to the underside of a desk and just put it onto a new machine when the government guys left.
